Arresting developments: Smart 'Disturbia' pays quirky homage to Hitchcock classic

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) April 14, 2007 -- Lots of nifty surveillance gadgets in place of James Stewart's telephoto lens and a romantic interest who looks like Gisele Bundchen's younger sister. This homage to the classic is so savvy and fun that Hitchcock purists shouldn't dare to complain.

Shia LaBeouf plays Kale, a good kid who witnesses his father's death in a car accident. Kale blames himself. A year later, he's troubled and acting out. When he clocks his Spanish teacher, it's his third run-in with the law. He is sentenced to house arrest for three months.

While no new ground is broken for music devotees, much is made clear and important insights are offered. Salzburg's position as a mountain-sheltered way station between Germany and Italy helps to explain the context of Mozart's early years and the type of commissions the town's ruling prince-archbishops wanted from their artistic servant.

Mozart was throughout his life very much an urban person, loving the company found in coffeehouses, billiard halls and gambling rooms. His music, while so often seeming gentle or intimate, is rarely pastoral. The infamous scatology in some of his letters to his wife Constanze Weber actually mirrors his time and even follows the example of his own straightlaced -- on the surface, at least -- parents.

Grabsky and his commentators make no attempt to "explain" Mozart's genius. It can't be done and speculation serves no purpose. Since all of the footage here is new, we lack only the observations of the great Viennese Mozart conductor Josef Krips, who memorably told Studs Terkel in 1964 that "Mozart was an angel who was sent for one second to our planet. He arrived completely unnoticed, and he disappeared. Up to now nobody knows where he's buried. He just disappeared ... [but] what he wrote was written for eternity."

Source: http://www.msn.com